Natalya I. Chyrkina

The relevance of the article is due to several contradictions of modern Russian education: the increase in the number of students in all training programs in secondary vocational education, the increase in income from secondary vocational education due to paid educational services and the unpreparedness of ninth-graders to make a responsible choice by the time they acquire basic general education, the continuing focus of the labor market on specialists with higher education. These contradictions determined the aim of the article: to highlight the reasons and possible consequences of the popularity of secondary vocational education programs among schoolchildren and to determine optimal models of continuity between secondary vocational and higher education. The review of the conceptual foundations of continuous training in the systems of secondary vocational and higher education allowed the author to draw a conclusion about the most popular and developed approaches in pedagogical theory: continuity of training at the level of didactic decisions (coordination of the successive content of education (within cross-cutting academic disciplines) and teaching methods (methods, technologies, forms)). The study used comparative analysis of theoretical approaches and the results of a survey of 132 students of secondary vocational education institutions in Omsk about the reasons for choosing secondary vocational programs and plans for continuing education at a university. The results of the study made it possible to forecast the possible consequences of the current situation in secondary vocational education for all levels of education. It is necessary to improve the procedure of the Unified State Exam at the school level (the fear of which pushes a significant part of schoolchildren to enter secondary vocational institutions), to introduce forms of earlier vocational guidance at school. At the level of secondary vocational education, we are to consider secondary vocational education programs as the first stage of end-to-end professional training. At the university level - initiate and promote different forms of continuity (didactic and methodological), update the most popular education formats among graduates of secondary vocational institutions (correspondence and distance learning, hybrid form). The theoretical significance of the study is in identification of the characteristics and reasons for the popularity of secondary vocational education programs among modern schoolchildren, in description of the necessary conditions that allow minimizing the risks of large outflow of schoolchildren after the 9th grade. The practical significance of the results is associated with the possibility of using the conclusions of the article for working out specific solutions at all levels of education.